Can China Save the Amur Tiger?

When Dale Miquelle first went to
work with Amur (or Siberian) tigers in the Russian Far East in 1992, wildlife
experts expected that the subspecies would be extinct by the end of the 20th
century. The population had dipped to as low as 30 individuals in the 1940s
before rebounding as a result of strict Soviet wildlife management, to about
200 to 300 animals in the early 1990s. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, taking
almost all environmental enforcement down with it. As the ruble and the Far
East economy went into free-fall, the tiger’s prey species, including deer and
wild boar, often wound up in the dinner pots of hungry locals. Commercial
poachers targeted the tigers themselves, selling the carcasses for $5,000 or
more to the traditional-medicine market just over the border in China.

It was hardly an auspicious time to
start the Siberian Tiger Project, a joint Russian-American effort now managed
by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Or maybe it was the best possible time,
because 17 years and more than $10 million later, Panthera tigris altaica survives, with a population estimated at 350 to 400
individuals in the wild. This relative success comes against a backdrop of
dramatic decline in tiger populations elsewhere. In India this summer, for
instance, Panna Nature Reserve announced that its tigers have been completely
wiped out by poaching, following the pattern established at Sariska, another
prominent Indian nature reserve, in 2005. Tigers worldwide have vanished from
41 percent of the habitat they occupied as recently as 1999, according to a
recent study. The total tiger population in the wild is now about 4,500
animals, down from 100,000 a century ago.

So Miquelle, a 1976 Yale College
gradu-ate who now heads the WCS Russian program, remains at best cautiously
optimistic. He lists three major threats to Amur tigers that never seem to go
away—poaching, to supply the lucrative traditional-medicine market; depletion
of prey species by hunters; and habitat loss due to a combination of logging,
mining, urban expansion and a new highway development likely to split off a key
part of the remaining tiger population. These threats come on top of a
relatively low reproductive rate and an extremely low level of genetic diversity.
(You can find more Amur tigers, and more varied DNA, in zoos than in the wild.)
Altogether, it means that no one is likely to declare the Amur tiger back from
the brink anytime soon.

But the Amur tiger now seems to
stand the best chance of survival among all the tiger subspecies, says John
Seidensticker, a Smithsonian zoologist and chair of the Save the Tiger Fund
Council. That’s both a tribute to the persistence of the Russian-American
effort and, he admits, a red flag in the face of India and other Asian nations,
where talk about conservation often exceeds results for extremely endangered
tiger populations. “I think the Amur tiger has a very good chance of survival
if we continue to maintain a high level of political will to support it, and
with [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin’s new interest, that looks good.”

Putin has made the Amur tiger a
symbol of his own status as the strong man of modern Russia. In 2008, he went
out with a Siberian Tiger Project team and took the delicate job of firing a
tranquilizer dart at a tiger caught in one of the team’s leg snares. (Box
traps, a safer method of trapping large predators, have not worked with
skittish Amur tigers.) No one filmed the shooting, but a Russian television
crew claimed that the tiger broke loose and charged before Putin brought it
down. Then Putin helped radio-collar the animal. “Putin the tiger tamer,” as
the BBC billed him, is now planning to host other heads of state from Asian
tiger countries for a fall 2010 Global Tiger Summit. World Bank President
Robert Zoellick has also pledged his support for the session in Vladivostok.
That kind of top-level summit could lead to improvements for tiger conservation
across Asia.

But 2010 promises to be a good year
for the Amur tiger in particular, with the potential for dramatic expansion of
habitat and population. Conservationists and the World Bank are currently
working with Chinese officials on a plan to invest in tiger recovery in the
same way China committed to panda conservation 30 years ago. That campaign
resulted in dramatic improvements for pandas—and a sorely needed environmental
success story for China. A similar effort now on behalf of the Amur tiger could
restore the subspecies to northeastern China, where it is for all practical
purposes extinct, and simultaneously provide a sustainable economic return by
revitalizing what is now a badly damaged forest. Noting that 2010 is the year
of the tiger in the Chinese calendar, a World Bank official suggests that
Chinese leaders attending the Global Tiger Summit are “going to be on the spot
to have a story to tell.”

The likely backdrop for that story
is a vast expanse of potential tiger habitat in Manchuria, on the border with
Russia and North Korea. It’s now “empty forest,” badly degraded by past logging
practices and largely devoid of wildlife, and a surprisingly sharp debate has
recently broken out about how best to repopulate it. Doctoral student Xuemei
Han ’07 and Chad Oliver ’70, Ph.D. ’75, Pinchot Professor of Forestry and
Environmental Studies, have proposed fixing the forest to make it more
habitable for the deer, boar and other ungulates the tigers require as prey.
But Miquelle of WCS says the real problem is stopping people from poaching the
prey that’s already there. Spending money on forest improvements, he says, is
“like you know someone has cancer and you are treating them for an allergy.”
Oliver, in turn, calls Miquelle’s resistance “a willful decision to reject
science at the peril of the tiger … not unlike a doctor performing malpractice
on a patient because he or she failed to understand a new medical discovery.”
Understanding how the two sides could get so far apart, when both say they have
the recovery of the Amur tiger at heart, requires knowing a bit more about the
fierce nature of tigers—and the people who study them.

‘The Tiger is God’

The tiger has always had a visceral
hold on the human imagination, because it is so massive and menacing and, yet,
also so elusive, slipping like a flame through field and forest. Even tiger
biologists almost never see the animals they study, though pug marks the size
of grapefruits or territorial scratching 10 feet up a tree keep them abundantly
alert to the hair-raising presence of tigers. So does the rising tock-tock on their headphones from an approaching radio
collar.

We tend to associate the species
mainly with India because of the rich mythology and the colorful history of
human coexist-ence with tigers there. For instance, the 18th-century Muslim
ruler, Tipu Sultan, called himself “the Tiger of Mysore”; sat on a throne in
the form of a tiger with fangs bared; sent his soldiers into battle in
tiger-striped uniforms; and kept a life-size action figure of a tiger mauling a
British soldier, complete with tiger snarls and agonized screaming. His motto
was “The tiger is God.”

But tigers also once lived from
eastern Turkey all the way to Japan and inhabited an extraordinary range of
latitudes, from almost 10 degrees south of the equator on the Indonesian island
of Bali to 55 degrees north in the Manchuria region of northeastern China. They
also managed to thrive in habitats ranging from sea level tropical rainforests
to 10,000 feet up in the Himalayas of Bhutan. Naturalists have traditionally
divided tigers into eight subspecies, of which three—the Javan, Caspian and
Balinese—went extinct in recent decades. But the differences between some of
these subspecies are minor and the tax-onomy has often been the subject of
dispute.

Early this year, for instance, a
study of mitochondrial DNA from Caspian tiger museum specimens showed that they
were essentially identical with the Amur tiger, differing by only a single
nucleotide. Oxford’s Carlos Driscoll and his co-authors theorized that
ancestral tigers migrated into Central Asia from China less than 10,000 years
ago via the Gansu Corridor (better known as the Silk Road), then spread west to
Turkey and east to Siberia. The study added to the critical importance of the
surviving population in the Russian Far East by classifying Amur tigers as
suitable for reintroduction not just in northeastern China, but all the way
across Central Asia to the Caspian Sea. But another study this year also
suggested that the value of this population may be imperiled by a genetic
divide along geographic lines.

“We were hoping she would die of old age, but she died the way most tigers die, killed by a poacher.” Dale Miquelle

Amur tigers now coexist with humans
in a largely forested area roughly the size of England and Wales. Their habitat
starts at the Chinese border a little southwest of Vladivostok and runs 600
miles north to the Amur River. It’s bounded on the west by the Ussuri River, a
tributary of the Amur. In the east, the tigers mostly roam the slopes of the
Sikhote-Alin coastal mountain range running down to the Sea of Japan. Only
about 10 percent of the Amur tiger’s range is protected, with the Sikhote-Alin
Zapovednik (or reserve) encompassing a mountainous area the size of Glacier
National Park. Fewer than 20 tigers (and a slightly larger population of
endangered Amur leopards) also survive along the Chinese border in the
Kedrovaya Pad Zapovednik, which is about as big as Washington, D.C.

The two populations are separated
by development along a highway corridor connecting the major cities of
Vladivostok and Ussuriysk in the south and Khabarovsk in the north. Genetic
research led by Michael Russello at the University of British Columbia has
recently found extremely low levels of genetic diversity in both populations.
Not only are the tigers descended from a handful of ancestors in the 1940s, but
they also experienced a population bottleneck about 10,000 years ago. “So they
have lived with a lack of genetic diversity for a long time,” says Russello,
who began his tiger research as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale in the laboratory
of co-author Gisella Caccone, a senior research scientist at Yale. But what’s
most alarming about the results, he says, is that the small southern
population, regarded as the natural source for reintroduction of tigers into
China, is now almost completely isolated.

“One of the things that really
jumps out,” says Russello, “is the need to establish a connection between
Sikhote-Alin and the southwestern population.” Instead, the Russian government
is now developing a new highway from the Vladivostok-Ussuriysk corridor to the
Chinese border. After extensive lobbying by conservationists, officials
recently agreed to preserve at least a vestige of corridor between the two
populations by burying a stretch of highway in a tunnel—the first time that
sort of accommodation of wildlife has happened in Russia.